A message from the Fire Chief:

Recently, and on more than one occasion members of the community have contacted city officials and members of the Fire Department directly to report a problem instead of calling 911. I want to take this opportunity to explain why it is vital to call 911 for emergencies and explain the process of how your Fire Department gets alerted to calls for service.

Baneberry and White Pine Fire Departments are dispatched through the Jefferson County 911 Center. When you call 911 to report a problem, operators are generating a call for service while you are still on the phone with them using a computer-aided dispatch system. With a few keystrokes and the press of a button, every member of the Baneberry and White Pine Fire Departments is alerted to the call through an application on our smartphones and our issued radios. This process only takes a few seconds to complete.

Through the alerting application on our phone, we get a lot of information:

• the nature of the call,
• the address or location of the problem,
• the location of the nearest fire hydrant,
• mapping function that gives precise driving directions to the location

Additionally, the 911 center keeps track of who is responding to the call and in what vehicle. By calling 911 the community gets the fastest response by the greatest number of responders. If more resources are needed to mitigate the problem, the 911 center can simply dispatch what we need from our neighboring agencies and even from outside of Jefferson County.

I understand that sometimes situations occur where a person is on the fence about wanting to call 911 because they may not think it’s an emergency. We would much rather err on the side of caution and have you call 911 instead of calling a city official or member of the department directly. Once a Fire Department member arrives on the scene we can reduce the response, downgrade it to non-emergency, or cancel it altogether.

In conclusion, please know that we are here to serve you. By calling 911 you place us in the best possible position to get to you as quickly as possible and have the best chance to mitigate whatever situation you called us for.